


Chimera

by gallifreyburning



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Pete's World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 04:53:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 18,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/820209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m only trying to be helpful, honestly,” Rose says. “Because if you’re holding me prisoner here, that means there’s this bloke coming to get me. And he’s been diagnosed with a problem – a condition. A blood and anger and revenge kind of condition. He’s not exactly in remission yet. When he shows up, there might be a bit of bloodshed, and I think we’d all rather avoid that.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The Doctor is drunk.

Properly, ridiculously, going-to-be-sorry-in-the-morning drunk.

He’s lying on the blanket of fresh snow in Red Square, his brown eyes tracking a zeppelin as it crosses the night sky. Rose stands next to him, her hands on her hips. Her fingertips and toes are warm and buzzing, she’s a bit bleary herself, but not nearly as far gone as he is.

She pushes the toe of her boot forward, nudges him in the side. “C’mon, Doctor, the hotel isn’t far. I’m pretty sure the Moscow police won’t like it if we sleep here.”

He rolls his head toward her. There’s snow caked between the spikes in his hair, a huge grin plastered on his face, and his gaze is dull with a haze of alcohol.

“We ought to get business cards!” he slurs, waving a hand in the air. “We need those now, yeah, ‘cause of the freelancing thing. Bloke in the bar asked me –  _hic_  – asked me for my information, and I didn’t have anything to give him! He said I could write it on a napkin, but  _that_ just  _screams_ unprofessionalism.”

“I don’t think that bloke was asking for your information because he needed help sorting an alien problem,” Rose sighs, giving up on the idea of getting him off the ground anytime soon. She lays down beside him on the bumpy cobbles, resting her head on his arm, which is stuck out perpendicular to his body.

The Doctor’s eyebrows draw together. “He doesn’t have an alien problem? But, but I told him, I said, I’m a  _freelancer._ It’s what I do.  _Free_ -lancer. Free- _lan_ -cer.” He makes a popping sound with his lips. “Why is it  _freelancer,_ though? Because we don’t work for free. And there aren’t any lances involved – could be, I suppose, in the right circumstances – that would be fun!”

Rose giggles. “Right. Well, for our next job, we’ll try to find something involving knights in armor and lances and maybe some sort of royal tourney. You’re pretty handy with a sword, if I recall.”

“Ooh,” he says, his mouth puckering into a pout, and Rose unconsciously licks her own lips, because it’s not bad to look at, that pout.  Makes her think about the things she can do with his bottom lip, and the sounds he makes when she nibbles on it. “I think that was supposed to be a pun. And as far as puns go, Rose Tyler, it was _terrible.”_

The celebratory drink after finishing their first official job as freelance alien specialists for UNIT had not gone exactly as Rose had anticipated. The Doctor’s not bad at holding his alcohol – has done all right with lager at quiz nights at the pub back in London – but the minute vodka hit his system, he was loopy as a loon.

He groans softly, his long, lean body wiggling against her side. “I think my left kidney is the rubbish human one. The right one’s the Time Lord one. And right now they’re arguing about who’s responsible for getting me out of this mess.”

Rose rolls onto her side to face him; she’s starting to shiver, the snow’s working its way into the waistband of her jeans. “I told you to stick with lager.”

“Clever,” the Doctor murmurs warmly, turning his face toward hers, blinking slowly. “My clever Rose.” The arm under her head moves, pulls her closer. His opposite arm slips around her waist, and she’s glad it’s the middle of the night, there aren’t many people around, because she’s suddenly seized with the urge to snog the Doctor senseless, right here and now in the middle of Red Square. Judging by the way his hips are pushing against hers, the idea has occurred to him, too.

The Doctor nuzzles her nose, his alcohol-scented breath puffing over her face. His lips brush her mouth, keep moving across her cheek, leaving a trail of little kisses until his mouth is right against her ear.

His voice is low and serious, his words not slurred in the slightest: “Clever girl. It’s in the corner. Always watching, slipping inside your dreams when you sleep. Don’t sleep, Rose. I’m coming.”

The lights of Red Square, the cold, the zeppelin, everything shudders. Glitches. Shatters.

Rose is curled into a fetal position in the corner of a featureless room. She doesn’t exactly wake up – she snaps out of a sleep-like trance, her mind coming back from somewhere else entirely while her body was here, closed in by six dull grey walls. She’s in her knickers and bra, her bare feet caked with dirt and her hair hanging into her eyes.

Leaning on the wall, using it to stand up, she tries to take inventory of her assets, get her bearings. But there are no bearings to take; there’s nothing to indicate where this grey room is, who’s outside of it, what brought her here.

_It’s in the corner._

Rose turns her eyes to the right, because the minute the Doctor’s warning echoes in her head, she can see  _it_  in her peripheral vision. And even when she’s staring right at it, she can’t quite see it – it must be using a perception filter, something stronger than usual, because she can’t focus on it properly.

But it’s  _there._ Darker grey than the rest of the room, towering a few feet taller than she is. Vaguely humanoid. Silent and unmoving.

“Listen, I don’t know who you are or where you’ve brought me,” she says to it. “But my name’s Rose Tyler, and I think there’s been a misunderstanding. Is there someone I can talk to – a commander or supervisor or something?”

The grey thing shifts. Stays silent.

“I’m only trying to be helpful, honestly,” Rose says. “Because if you’re holding me prisoner here, that means there’s this bloke coming to get me. And he’s been diagnosed with a problem – a condition. A blood and anger and revenge kind of condition. He and I have been working on it, managing it pretty well most of the time, but he’s not exactly  _in remission_  yet. When he shows up, there might be a bit of bloodshed, and I think we’d all rather avoid that. So is there someone I can talk to?”

The grey thing doesn’t move, but a low, hardly audible hiss comes from where it’s standing. Every single hair on Rose’s body stands on end; panic begins to tickle at the base of her stomach.

“I can already tell you’re going to be a rubbish roommate,” she hisses back at it, fingers curling, fingernails scratching against the slippery wall behind her.


	2. Chapter 2

A mechanical popping noise comes from the ceiling, and a square door slides open above their heads. There’s nothing to see beyond it, just blackness.

The grey humanoid shadow in the corner is on the move, shimmying up the sheer wall like some kind of lizard or spider. It crawls out the door, the mechanical popping noise sounds again, and the door slides shut.

The panic tickling at Rose’s stomach is getting more persistent, demanding attention – sweat beading on her brow, even though the room is a comfortable temperature, heart beginning to pound. She forces her breath to stay even, surveys the featureless cell – no bed, no sink, no toilet. Without facilities, given any amount of time, this space won’t be so pristine anymore.

Rose begins to feel her way along the walls and floor, checking for hidden seams, probing into the joints between each surface, looking for any sign of another door. Because the ceiling is high enough, Rose can’t reach the exit her hissing grey roommate used.

As she works methodically across the room, she thinks about the last thing she remembers, before waking up in this box. A summit in Geneva, hosted by UNIT and attended by specialists from countries around the world, to determine alien contact procedures and policies. This, after six separate incidents over the last two years, of the Doctor chasing unwanted, less than friendly visitors from the planet.

Somehow the director at Torchwood had talked the Doctor into serving as primary summit mediator. Which led to the Doctor coming back to the hotel with his first real, human migraine. He was laid up, spreadeagle across the king-sized bed, damp washcloth on his forehead, groaning and fussing about inferior human biology and inappropriate stress responses, about hard-headed Australians and ridiculous Americans. Rose left him alone in the suite, asked the concierge for directions to the nearest chemists, so she could go survey the shelf full of painkillers and see if one might be suitable and non-poisonous to a Time Lord-human body.

She’s stepped out of the hotel, walked two blocks in the dark, and that was it. That was all she remembered.

So obviously whoever had her in this little cell had done a snatch-and-grab on the downtown streets of Geneva, just after sunset.

Ballsy.

There isn’t a crack or weakness in any of the walls, not that Rose can see. She goes to work trying to scratch at the surface with her fingernails, wondering if it’s like sheetrock or plaster, if perhaps she can dig or punch her way through. But it’s smooth, doesn’t dent or scratch no matter how much of her energy she directs at it.

And as far as her assets go, she’s got her wits and her lingerie. The bra has underwires – could come in handy as soon as she figures out how to get to that portal in the ceiling. For now, she sits down in the corner and waits for her captors to come back.

The Doctor in her dream had warned her about them being inside her head when she was vulnerable, when she was sleeping.

It wasn’t  _actually_  the Doctor, of course, it was her Torchwood psychic training, kicking in and manifesting as something familiar and trustworthy, something she’ll listen to. Warning her that she wasn’t the only one inside her own head. The  _I’m coming_ bit wasn’t the Doctor speaking to her telepathically from wherever he is, either; it’s just her unshakeable faith in him, her knowledge that he  _is_ coming, he  _will_ come.

And that particular moment in Moscow, it wasn’t a dream as such, it was a  _memory_  of something that had happened four months ago. It hadn’t ended with the Doctor warning her to stay awake; it had ended with them getting arrested for public intoxication and indecency (it’s really remarkable, the way the Doctor can slip his long, slender hands under her waistband, no matter how tight her jeans) and spending the night in jail. The Doctor talked them out without bail the next morning, and Rose had never realized exactly how sexy he sounded when he spoke Russian, but ever since, he’d begun sidling up to her and murmuring random phrases in her ear, all deep seductive vowels, even when he says things like, “You used all the toothpaste, my darling furry potato.”

Had they gone to the hotel in Geneva and snatched the Doctor too? Is he in another one of these cells nearby, plotting and planning and figuring out how to escape? Seems unlikely; surely whoever’s got her prisoner would’ve just taken them both in the hotel room, if that was the case.

Likely he waited in that hotel for her to come back. How long would it have taken him to realize she was gone? Did he fall asleep, not realize until he woke up alone the next morning? Rose chews on her cuticles, doing a mental walkthrough of Torchwood and UNIT procedure for recovering missing personnel, wondering if it was a matter of minutes or hours before the Doctor decided to take matters into his own hands, requisition equipment and a vehicle, and set off on his own.

_Don’t sleep._

Easy enough, for a while. Plenty to think about, plenty of plans to make. Reaching the door in the ceiling. Confronting the grey creature when it reappears in her cell. Helping her mum bake a strawberry cake for Tony’s birthday next week. Finally sewing the button back on the Doctor’s trousers, the button she’d torn off a month ago in a hurry, and afterward promised she’d fix as soon as she found a needle and thread.

But there’s no sense of time within these walls. No passage of the sun, no ticking of a clock. And Rose sets about counting seconds, minutes, hours. Trying to keep track of _something,_ to maintain her bearings. Because she doesn’t think she’s been here long, but there’s no way to tell how long she was asleep. Or unconscious. Or whatever that was. Could have been minutes, or hours, or days.

Rose is fairly certain she knows why her captors haven’t reappeared, what they’re waiting for; she’s also certain that, no matter how long she holds out, if the Doctor doesn’t come sooner rather than later, they’re going to get it.

They do.

Rose is lounging on the couch in Pete and her mum’s living room. It’s dark outside, the house is quiet except for a fire crackling in the fireplace. She and the Doctor had agreed to babysit Tony for the night, and the Doctor’s been upstairs putting him to bed for an hour now – she peeked in twenty minutes ago, found that a month’s worth of laundered sheets had been made into a tent city, stretching from one end of Tony’s room to another. Heard the murmur of voices from somewhere on the other side of the room, the Doctor’s enthusiastically describing something about a planet with fish made of ice that swim through the sky and Tony making appropriate sounds of awe. Both of them would be disappointed if she intervened, insisted that Tony go to bed, so she left them be.

It isn’t terribly late, but Rose is already tired; having the Doctor here, in this universe, in her life, is still so novel. It’s only been a few weeks since the beach, a few weeks to remember how to be around each other again. A few weeks of realizing he has no idea how to use a charge card or operate a fuel pump or turn on an oven.

There’s a soft clinking noise from the stairs, followed by a louder  _oof!_

Rose is on her feet instantly. “Doctor?”

She finds him at the foot of the stairs, on his bum. Leaning up against the first few steps, staring at the ceiling, at the chandelier swinging suspiciously overhead.

His eyes swivel over to her, and he swallows, tucking his hands behind his head. “Adolescent brimmwigs make a very distinctive noise,” he says. “A sort of a humming sound, if you’ve heard it once, you never forget it.”

Rose sits down on the step beside him, leans back to stare up at the chandelier with him. “And these brimmwigs look like crystal and brass lighting fixtures, do they?”

“Brimmwigs just  _happen_  to be masters of luminescent disguise,” he replies, a touch indignantly. “There was an infestation in Tokyo in 1821, hundreds of them hidden in plain sight as paper lanterns. Took weeks to hunt them all down.”

“Mmm. And is Mum’s Swarovski chandelier actually an alien infestation?” Rose asks, lifting her eyebrows.

He clears his throat, stretching his legs out, the heels of his trainers making a squeaking noise on the marble floor. “You’ll be pleased to know I’ve verified that the distinctive humming noise is coming from a bit of faulty tungsten in the incandescent bulbs, and poses no threat whatsoever. Except, of course, the threat of wasting electricity – really, your mum ought to switch to xenon bulbs.” The Doctor lifts his head, looks at her. “Do they have those here? Xenon bulbs?” 

She bites her lip and shakes her head. “Dunno.”

His gaze slips down to her mouth, and his hand finds hers, fingers knitting together. “It’s odd, sometimes, this universe. Like walking through a room in the dark, a room you’ve lived your whole life in and you know the furniture placement by heart, except someone’s moved the sofa a foot to the right.”

“Yeah. It gets better, but that sofa never does feel like it’s where it belongs.” When she smiles, his expression mirrors hers, the corners of his mouth turning up and his tongue touching his bottom lip.

His hand is warm – warmer than she remembers from before, warmer than the other Doctor’s was when she held it on the Dalek Crucible ship. The edge of each step is poking uncomfortably into her back, the carpet tickling her neck, but she’s stopped noticing those things. Instead, she’s noticing how very close the Doctor is, how his gaze has fixed to her face, how he’s hardly breathing.

She wants this – wants him. Has since he had blue eyes and big ears. And here he is, being so very careful, as though he’s afraid she might break, or toss him out, or walk away.

As though she could.

Rolling onto her shoulder, she leans over, plants a kiss on his cheek. When she pulls away, just enough to get a look at his face, his brown eyes are wide, and he’s staring at her as though she just hung the moon in the sky. “What was that for?”

“I’m glad you’re here. With me.”

“Are you?” he asks quickly, and it reminds her of Christmas day and the Sycorax and standing in a flurry of ash that looked like snow, each of them tentative and nervous and wondering if this new regeneration, this new Doctor, was something the other one could live with.

Without hesitation, Rose nods. “Yeah.”

The Doctor’s other hand caresses her cheek, long fingers slipping back into her hair. He pulls her close, pulls her mouth to his own. It’s slow, still tentative, closed lips and bumping noses. A soft touch at the corner of her mouth, in the center of her bottom lip. She parts them, her tongue slipping forward, shy and wanting and trembling with nerves.

The noise the Doctor makes isn’t human – Rose isn’t even sure it’s Time Lord – some sort of a growling moan, crackling with need. He rises up, rolls her onto her back on the stairs, his fingers slipping into her hair as he cradles her head, fingertips cool on her scalp. His mouth opens, his body resting carefully against hers. Rose kisses him back, eyes closed and skin tingling from the crown of her head to her toes. She’s pulling at his oxford, wiggling against him, stars dancing behind her closed eyelids.

“Ro-o-o-o-se!”

The Doctor is up like a shot, hopping to his feet and trying to pull Rose along, but she’s disoriented, still lost in the taste of him. She ends up falling back down onto the stairs, dragging the Doctor with her into a pile of flailing limbs and startled squeaks.

Jackie walks into the foyer, Pete right behind her. Her eyes go wide, her arms crossing as she frowns. “Can’t you two wait at least until you get back to Rose’s flat? Good Lord.” The Doctor scrambles to his feet again, running a hand through his thoroughly rumpled hair as Jackie continues, “If I’d realized that babysitting would interrupt your busy snogging schedule, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“Mum, this isn’t what you think,” Rose protests, her face burning and flooded with blood and she must be bright scarlet, she’s so flushed.

Jackie looks them both up and down and arches an eyebrow. “Oh, isn’t it?”

The Doctor is trying to tuck his shirttails into his pinstriped trousers, aiming for subtlety and failing. “Tony’s asleep, nodded right off after the twenty-fourth bedtime story!”

Pete shakes his head, trying to smother a smile. “Didn’t tell the boy any stories to keep him awake, did you?”

The Doctor gropes behind him until Rose sticks her hand out, takes his fingers and squeezes them. Then he says, “Just about the grey men, waiting in corners when he falls asleep.”


	3. Chapter 3

When Rose opens her eyes, there’s a table with a cup and bowl on it in the middle of the room.

There’s also something grey in the corner, standing perfectly still and silent.

If it wasn’t for the years she’d spent at Torchwood, trying to get back to the Doctor, she wouldn’t have the psychic training to see it. To recognize and look past the perception filter, even if she still can’t make out any of its features.

This time, instead of speaking to it, Rose keeps her eyes averted, pretends she doesn’t know it’s there. Cautiously approaches the table. The bowl is full of some kind of brown mush – almost like oatmeal. As a matter of fact, identical to oatmeal. The glass is full of a clear liquid. Saliva pools underneath Rose’s tongue as she picks it up, peers into its crystal contents, takes a long, slow sniff, trying to determine if it is what it seems.

If they were going to drug her, it seems likely they would have done so already. As much as she hates to admit it, she’s fairly helpless in this little grey box; there are any number of gaseous anesthesias they could pump into the air system to knock her out. But they haven’t, they seem to want her to sleep on her own, instead of in an artificially induced state.

Keeping the grey man in the corner of her eye, watching it for a reaction, she lifts the glass to her mouth. Lets the water touch her lips, but doesn’t actually drink. The grey man stays perfectly still, doesn’t so much as twitch, doesn’t seem to be breathing.

It smells like water, feels like water, and Rose is so thirsty she’s salivating, her tongue aching for what’s inside the glass, but she doesn’t open her mouth and drink. She repeats the process with the mush – it’s cold, but it’s cooked, and it smells and feels exactly like oatmeal. There isn’t a spoon, so she digs out a few oats on her fingertip and touches them to her tongue.

They taste like oatmeal.

Rose really,  _really_ wants them to be oatmeal. Because it’s been at least a day since she last ate, and hunger is clawing out the base of her stomach.

Without swallowing any of the offerings, she takes the bowl and cup and puts them on the floor. Picks up the table – three-legged and round and about the size of her torso. Turns it over, inspects the legs and how they’re affixed to the top. There aren’t any discernible screw-holes, so she experimentally pulls on one leg. It doesn’t budge. Twists. Still no movement.

With a shrug, Rose turns the table right-side up, replaces the food and water atop it, and returns to her corner. Sits down and starts to sing in a low voice: “ _I’m Henery the Eighth, I am; Henery the Eighth I am, I am. I got married to the widow next door, She’d been married seven times before. And every one was an Henery — Henery — It wouldn’t be a Willie or a Sam. I’m her eighth old man named Henery, Henery the Eighth, I am. Second verse, same as the first. I’m Henery the Eighth I am …_ ”

Rose doesn’t mean to fall asleep; she doesn’t even feel tired. She intends to stay awake, to observe her observer, to see if it leaves her alone again now that she’s awake, or if it stays and watches. To see if it realizes it’s been noticed, or if she can trick it into thinking it’s still camouflaged. 

She’s been singing for so long her voice is getting tired and her throat is completely parched, her words reduced to a dull croak. Her grey roommate hasn’t so much as twitched, as far as she can tell, as indistinct as it still is, hidden behind a perception filter.

Rose’s own raspy words morph into the Doctor’s voice, the darkness behind her eyelids turning into bright afternoon light. It’s autumn of last year, the leaves on the trees in Hyde Park a riot of rich colors. The Doctor stands with Tony on a grassy lawn, kite high in the air above them.

The two of them are singing “I’m Henery the Eighth” together – the Doctor taught Tony the song over the course of their afternoon picnic, and Rose is certain it’s only because he wants Tony to go home and sing it endlessly in his enthusiastic little-boy voice, just to irk Jackie.

Sitting on the picnic blanket, Rose takes a sip of her tea – warm, with a touch of honey and milk – and smiles. There’s a grey figure standing beside a tree just across the lawn, watching, observing. A small, distant voice in Rose’s head screams for her to chase down the grey man, tackle it, stop it from ransacking her memories.

Her body is incapable of responding to the voice. Instead, she takes another sip of tea and concentrates on the Doctor, on Tony.

The Doctor’s absorbed in demonstrating the proper way to keep the kite aloft, babbling about lift and force and windspeed, holding Tony’s tiny hands with his own. When he pulls the string, his wrist moving in a complicated pattern, the kite swoops in a circle. Tony shouts in delight, interrupting their song, and jumps up.

“Again!” he demands.

The Doctor obliges, except this time the kite doesn’t make the entire circle; it sails down in a horrifically elegant arc, right into a boat on the nearby pond. The man in the boat flails in surprise, the boat tips over, and the Doctor dives right in on a rescue mission.

Sputtering, triumphant, hair wild and dripping, the Doctor emerges with the kite. “Got it!”

Rose drops her tea on the grass and sprints past him, diving into the water, because the bloke from the boat is splashing around behind the Doctor like he doesn’t know how to swim.

She pulls the boater to shore, and when they show up at her mum and Pete’s doorstep a while later, everyone except Tony dripping and shivering in the cool autumn air, Jackie brings them inside and bundles them in fluffy towels.

Later that night, after they get back to the flat, the Doctor calls Rose into the bathroom while he’s taking a shower. Points to his hair, chestnut speckled with green, and says something about how he can’t tell if he’s gotten all the algae and pennywort out.

She joins him, steam and hot water and bare skin. He leans his head forward, so she can reach, and she’s only got her hands in his hair for a few seconds before his mouth meets her shoulder, and he proceeds to pin her up against the tiled wall, tasting the water droplets beaded across her collarbones.

It’s far from the first time they’ve made love, but it’s certainly the first time he’s washed and brushed her hair afterward. His long fingers are slow and methodical, massaging in the shampoo and conditioner and pulling the comb through, triumphantly exclaiming  _HA!_  every time he extracts a fleck of pennywort. By the time he’s finished, Rose is so relaxed she can hardly stand up.

When they fall into bed, clean and exhausted, arms wrapped around each other and foreheads pressed together, she’s more than ready to drift off to sleep.

“That was nice today. With Tony,” the Doctor says.

Pulling her eyes open with some difficulty, Rose blinks at him. “Mmm. The jumping-in-the-pond bit, or the riding-home-in-a-taxi-while-soaking-wet bit?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of the …” he pauses, nose brushing her cheek, lips touching hers “…of the being around kids bit.”

It registers somewhere beneath heavy layers of exhaustion, the Doctor is trying to say something important. Her focus sharpens; she stares right into his eyes, which look black in the dim light.

“Wouldn’t mind doing that more. With Tony. Maybe even someday with other kids who  _aren’t_ Tony. If it’s something you wouldn’t mind, I mean – of course, you’d have to agree, we’d have to be on the same boat – ohh, bad choice of words. Sturdier boat than the bloke on the pond today, certainly something with a wider bottom, for the two of us and however many we might —”

“Doctor,” Rose interrupts, reaching up to trace the side of his face with her hand, following the line of his jaw and his slightly dotty ear.

“Kids,” he blurts, then sucks his bottom lip into his mouth as though it might work as a cork, stoppering his gob.

Rose’s eyes widen. “Oh.”

“Just thinking out loud, saying anything that pops into my head. You know how I do that. All the time. Never can seem to stop. I’ll be babbling about kippers next.”

“Kids,” Rose says. “Not right now, not this minute, but yeah.” She smiles, tongue caught between her teeth. “Yeah. I’d like that, someday.”

“Good.” The word pops out, sudden and happy and simple. Every bit of him is beaming.

“But right now, sleep,” Rose says. “M’kay?”

“Sleep’s good too.” He plants a kiss on the tip of her nose. “Just remind me when we wake up, to take care of the man in the corner.”

“Isn’t a man,” Rose replies, her eyes slipping closed. “Something else. Something alien.”

“It’s  _always_ something alien, Rose,” he whispers. “In your bed, in your arms, in the corner of the room, in your marrow.”

She giggles, and it ends with a soft snort. “I’m as human as they come, Doctor. Nothing in my marrow.”

The Doctor’s palm skates down her side, over her hip.  _“_ Mmm. Can’t fool me, Rose Tyler, I’ve  _seen_  your marrow.” He rests his lips against hers, his words hardly louder than his breath:

_“Bad wolf.”_

There isn’t a glitching or shattering or twisting of the dream, like there was last time, but Rose’s eyes snap open; she’s not in bed at home with the Doctor, she’s in her cell. Her grey roommate isn’t in the corner directly opposite of her any more. Her eyes dart from one side to the other; her concentration sharpens. The other corners look empty, too — she blinks rapidly, stares at the ceiling, and that’s when she catches sight of it in her peripheral vision. Still here, dark grey and humanoid and standing in the corner just to her right, closer than before. 

From somewhere outside of her cell — she has no idea how far away — comes the muffled sound of an explosion. The walls quiver, the cup and bowl on the tripod table clatter softly. The grey man stays stock-still.

_The Doctor’s here._


	4. Chapter 4

Rose leaps to her feet and lunges for the table. She flips it on its side, heedless of the bowl and glass, food and crockery splattering across the wall. With two of its three legs lying parallel against the ground, she brings up her right foot and stomps the third leg, snapping it off completely. The arch of her bare foot cramps in protest, but Rose ignores it.

The grey man in the corner is moving, ascending the wall; there’s a mechanical pop, and the portal in the ceiling slides open.

Without giving herself a chance to think about what she’s doing, Rose snatches up the broken table leg and takes a running leap at the grey man. She catches its ankle in her free hand and the thing hisses, swivels its head in her direction, flailing and kicking as it holds onto the wall. It’s still moving, climbing, the floor moving away below them.

Its flesh is cool and smooth under her hands, there’s no fabric or form of clothing she’s familiar with. She swings her other arm up, not entirely sure what she’s planning to do with her makeshift club but reassured by the fact she’s got it, anyway. Grips the grey man’s leg in both hands as it continues to haul itself up the wall, across the ceiling, with Rose dangling down beneath it.

It gets to the door, slips through and stops at just the spot where Rose’s hand is outside, gripping its calf, and the rest of her is still inside the cell. The mechanical popping noise sounds, and the door begins to move, about to close on Rose’s wrist.

Rose flips the table leg around, jams it in the doorway a split-second before it’s too narrow to fit. It’s holding the door open, for the moment. The machinery driving the door hums and whines in protest, gears grinding as it tries to push through the table leg.

The grey man is kicking and flailing, hissing wildly in the darkness above her head. Rose grabs the edge of the door with her free hand before letting him go, holding onto the edge with both hands, and hauling herself upward. She’s waiting for something to hit her from above, force her back into the room, but as her head comes up above the edge of the portal, she doesn’t see anyone nearby.

Rose gets her torso above the edge of the portal and that’s when it happens – gravity switches orientation. She’d thought she was pulling herself up out of a floor, but in reality she’s pulling herself out of a portal in a wall; the gravity in her cell must have been artificially shifted and maintained. Climbing the rest of the way out is a bizarre sensation, gravity tugging down on her feet and sideways on her upper body.

A wave of nausea sweeps over Rose as she tumbles to the wall – the floor – tumbles _down,_ her center of gravity shifting. She’s feeling a bit lightheaded, because she hasn’t had anything to eat or drink in more than twenty-four hours, and the air out here is  _much_ colder than it was in her cell. She’s shivering in her bra and knickers, barefoot in a dingy metal hallway.

Reaching up, she snatches the table leg out of the door, and the portal grinds shut. The grey man isn’t visible, or anyone else for that matter, but that doesn’t mean she’s alone; it’s likely she just can’t see them yet.

Hefting her makeshift club, Rose stands completely still and listens. The distant hum and clank of machinery sounds from somewhere off to the right. Rose heads away from it, the sound of engines or generators. Because whether she’s in a spaceship or a military facility, the power source will be central, more shielded. The Doctor will be somewhere toward the outside.

Minute after minute drags by. Rose opens half a dozen hatches, climbs through, and gravity switches on her twice more: the floor becomes the wall becomes the ceiling. Hisses sound from the shadows along the wall, from the space under the floor grating, and she grips her table leg so hard her hand has gone numb. But none of them emerge, challenge her as she navigates the corridors.

Gradually the air fills with the acrid smell of melted metal, and the evidence of an explosion appears – twisted fragments of metal, burst pipes, things Rose has to navigate carefully with her bare feet, ends up cutting herself on anyway.

Rose’s steps quicken, the hissing sound fades, and when she rounds a corner, she finds someone standing at a computer terminal, surveying a readout of alien language. Not a grey man, although he does have a head full of silver hair. Tall, skinny, wearing a long brown trench coat, sonic screwdriver in one hand, pulse pistol in the other. There are corpses at his feet - a dozen, singed shot wounds to grey torsos and otherwise smooth, featureless grey faces.

Rose stumbles to a stop, still gripping the table leg. Her heart is fluttering, her body coursing with adrenaline, and she tentatively hazards, “Doctor?”

The silver-haired man whips around, and Rose’s breath catches in her throat. He is old. Wrinkles across his forehead, deep creases around the eyes and mouth she otherwise knows so well. Well into his seventies, perhaps older.

“Rose!” The word is choked, broken. “Oh god, Rose!” He closes the distance between them, sweeps her into his arms, lifts her off the ground.

As old as his face might be, he  _feels_  like her Doctor, full of wiry strength.

“Doctor.” She clings to him, shivering in his arms, and he’s trembling, too.

He buries his face in her hair, and whispers in her ear, “What have they done to you?” Letting her go, he steps back just far enough to slip off his overcoat and draw it over her shoulders. She slides her arms into the sleeves, wraps the warm fabric around her torso.

The Doctor shoves the sonic into his suit pocket and shifts his grip on the pistol. He’s handling it with the practiced ease of a gunslinger, flipping the safety and engaging the energy chamber without looking at it. “We have to go. Now.” 

“How — how long? How long has it been?” Rose manages, watching his long fingers with a certain dawning horror.

He reaches out to take her hand. Stares at his skin, dappled with freckles and age spots and draped across his bones; and her skin, young and pink and pulsing with blood and life.

“Forty years,” he says, his gaze meeting hers. “They’ve had you in stasis for forty years.

A hissing noise fills the corridor behind them. The Doctor flicks another switch on the pulse pistol with his thumb, fires off a blast of orange energy into the darkness. The walls look like they’ve come to life, wiggling and writhing with grey bodies. 

The Doctor tugs at her hand, his brown eyes still so very bright and young. “Run!”

Rose does, right behind him, moving at full tilt even though she’s barefoot and bleeding. The long tails of the overcoat brush her calves, and she can’t keep the front of it closed, the lapels flapping. Moving in a rhythm born of hundreds of adventures together, they vault over piles of wrecked machinery and corpses decimated by the Doctor’s entry blast and subsequent gunfire.

The Doctor leads them through three junctions and around a curve, they’re in a corridor that ends in a wall.  _Used to_  end in a wall. Right now, the wall is gone, and there’s only a gaping hole instead, a cold and unforgiving field of stars outside.

They barrel closer without slowing down. 

“Do you still trust me?” the Doctor shouts over his shoulder, squeezing her hand.

“Always!” Rose replies with without hesitation.

The Doctor tosses his pistol to the side, fishes in his pocket for the sonic screwdriver. Aims it at the hole in the side of the ship. There’s a crackle of energy, a pop and whooshing sound, and whatever emergency shield or containment mechanism had engaged to sustain the atmosphere is gone.

They’re only a few strides away when the vacuum meets atmosphere, when a tremendous gush of wind pushes them both from behind, knocks the breath out of Rose, and jettisons them both into space.

A piece of metal catches Rose’s arm on the way out, tears the sleeve of the Doctor’s coat and digs a deep gash into her bicep. A few bits of blood seep out, freeze and crystallize, float off in different directions. Pain screams through her body from head to toe. The utter cold, the lack of pressure the way her body feels like its swelling and twisting and going to burst. She can’t inhale – there’s nothing to inhale – her body is screaming for air, her blood bubbling in her veins.

She’s wiggling like a fish, can’t stop herself, when arms lock around her torso. Cold, stiff fingers cradle the back of her head. The Doctor is in front of her, so close she can see flecks of light brown in the dark depths of his eyes, glittering reflections of the thousand suns he’s seen.

The Doctor’s mouth finds hers, his stiff lips part, and a gust of breath slips over her tongue and down her throat.

The Doctor, the stars, the wrecked spaceship — everything glitches. Shudders. Shatters.

Rose wakes up in her cell. 

The table is untouched in the middle of the room, the cup and bowl pristine. Blinking away the memory of an elderly, dying Doctor, shaking from head to foot, Rose sucks in a deep breath of perfectly normal air. She pushes to her feet.

The grey man in the corner steps forward and tilts its head at her. Squinting, Rose ignores the headache blossoming behind her eyes as she strains to see past its perception filter.

“This is getting tiresome,” she says to it. Her throat is bone dry, her voice croaky and full of exasperation. “Isn’t it about time you bring your supervisor in for a word?”


	5. Chapter 5

The grey man hisses, and after a beat a low, gravelly voice filters through the room, atop the hissing noise, like some sort of translation device has kicked in. “I plumb memories of what has been, and you seized the reflective session and shared memories of what could be. How do you access memories the future? You register as human, yet this ability is beyond human reach.”

 _What could be._ Not  _what will be._ “Oh, so you  _can_ communicate. And you  _haven’t_ had me in stasis for forty years.”

“Stasis is reserved for the most dangerous of subjects. Are you dangerous?”

Rose stares up at the grey man, her teeth clenching, and tries to keep her face smooth. A hundred dimension jumps flash through her mind, dozens of situations she’s found herself in, acts she’s committed to survive, things she’s never discussed with Torchwood psychologists during debriefs — or any other living soul, for that matter. And even before the Dimension cannon, there was the devil on a rocket-ship, a Dalek fleet rendered to dust.

She’s banking, she realizes, that this grey man can’t read her mind unless she’s asleep.

“You register as human, not hybrid. Are our sensors wrong?” it says.

“I’m human,” she replies instantly.

“Yet there’s something in your marrow, the Time Lord said. Badwolf does not register as a species in our databanks. What is a badwolf?”

This alien knows what the Doctor is. This alien knows the secret whispers in Rose’s head.

She crosses her arms, curls her toes into the smooth floor. Scattered through time and space in another universe, no trace of it here, how could her captor possibly begin to comprehend Bad Wolf? When even Rose hardly knows the extent of what it means, or how it operates; when Rose has absolutely no control over its manifestation?

After all, once they’d left Satellite Five, Rose thought Bad Wolf long gone. But then in Norway, on the journey back to London with her half-human Doctor, he’d told her how it manifested again – not only the message she’d given to a dying Donna Noble, but the phrase scrawled thousands of times across an alien market on a distant planet.

Rose shakes her head. “Why exactly do you have me here? What are you looking for, in these ‘reflective sessions’? Because invading someone else’s mind, rifling through their thoughts like a thief ransacking a house – that’s not exactly nice. You could just _ask,_ instead of  _taking._ I don’t appreciate being used like a video playback device.” She wants to spout something about articles of the Shadow Proclamation, intergalactic law and the rights of sentient beings, but she isn’t certain there  _is_ a Shadow Proclamation in this universe.

The grey man takes a step closer; it’s just beyond striking distance (if it were inclined to strike at her, or she were provoked to strike at it). Rose’s stomach flutters, her muscles tense, her eyes blurring over at the effort of staring at the perception filter.

“Right now it looks like I’m aboard a ship of alien perverts, the memories you’ve been calling up. Are you studying human sexual practices or something? Because I could just draw you a diagram.”

“Eat, human,” it says. For a panicked instant, she thinks it intends to eat  _her,_  it’s giving her warning before it feeds on her flesh. But it swivels to the side, gestures to the cold oatmeal and water.

“How do I know you’re not going to poison me?”

The grey man swivels back toward her. “We have verified the nutritional needs of your species, and have manufactured food accordingly. It is not harmful to you. Eat.”

And with that, the grey man takes an impressive leap from the middle of the cell to the top corner of the room, slithering across the ceiling and to the hatch, which opens with a pop.

Rose stares after it, furious and bewildered, fists clenching and unclenching. She opens her mouth and a scream comes out – pent-up frustration and anger and the feral noise ends in an accusation at the closed hatch: “ _Coward_!”

A few hours later, Rose caves in and eats the oatmeal, drinks the water. Afterward, she feels better – stronger. And there isn’t a hint of anything amiss, not even a gurgle in her stomach; the grey man was telling the truth, apparently.

One of the myriad problems with this grey being rifling around in her head while she sleeps: she doesn’t feel rested when she wakes up. As a matter of fact, she feels just as exhausted as if she and the Doctor  _did_ just run through endless corridors of an alien ship and take a suicidal leap into space. Her muscles are sore, her eyelids heavy, and no matter how long she fights it, sleep finds her again eventually.

The cavern is trembling, the very air quivering, pebbles clattering down on their heads. Rose has clambered past the Doctor down a steep slope of shale, slipping on her arse to the bottom, the beam of her torch bobbing wildly in the pitch dark. The Doctor skids down just behind her, long arms and legs flailing.

When Rose pops to her feet, she takes a few steps, groping behind her for his hand. Coming up empty.

Rose whirls around. The beam of her torch finds him still on the ground at the bottom of the slope, his knees bent, his head tipped forward and fingers buried in his hair. She can hear him gasping for breath.

“Doctor,” she says, dropping into a squat beside him. She’s already feeling across his scalp and neck for an injury. “Are you okay? Where did you get hurt? Is it bleeding?”

He collapses back onto the slope, sucking in a ragged breath, and slaps his chest with his hand a few times. “No respiratory bypass. Never realized how rubbish human lungs are. Rubbish. Rubbish.” He gasps the word a few more times, his lips caked with dust from the explosion a few minutes ago, his tongue bright pink in contrast. “Complete rubbish.”

“C’mon, we’re almost there,” she says, tugging at his arm. “Not long now.”

He grabs her hand, panic plain in his wide brown eyes. “My heart – Rose – I’m – is this – is this what a heart attack feels like?”

Rose would laugh and chalk the Doctor’s comment up to his flair for the dramatic, except for the raw terror written across his features. He’s sprawled on the rocks, his face flushed crimson and his breathing still labored to the point of hyperventilation.

The cavern shudders again, rocks flaking from the walls. There’s an alien warship on the surface, poking holes in downtown Madrid, on the hunt for the same device the Doctor and Rose are tracking right now. It’s been two months since they walked off of Bad Wolf Bay together, two months having a lie-low and Rose being on administrative leave from Torchwood. Then came a spur-of-the-moment minibreak to Spain, an unofficial text from Jake about an unwelcome alien presence in the vicinity, come to Earth scouting for an artifact abandoned here a millennia ago.

Tracking clues from one end of Madrid to another, hours upon hours of running, and here she and the Doctor are – in the middle of their first proper adventure together, in the middle of  _her_ Doctor’s first proper adventure in this new regeneration ( _she doesn’t have any doubts about that anymore, in every possible way, he_ is _her Doctor_ ) – and apparently he’s on the verge of a cardiac event half a mile beneath Plaza Mayor.

Looking at his anguished, panicked face, Rose is consumed with fear, with flashbacks of a starless night on a London street, a Dalek and the Doctor lying mortally injured in her arms just before he regenerated.

Except this time, the Doctor won’t regenerate.

“It’s okay,” she says, trying to reassure herself as much as him. Leaning down, she yanks open his jacket. “It’s okay, take slow, deep breaths.” He’s squeezing her hand so tightly her fingers have gone numb. She places her other hand on the left side of his chest, feels the frantic and steady  _thump-THUMP_ of his heart. He’s staring at the blackness above their heads, his pupils enormous and his gaze unfocused.

“Doctor, look at me,” Rose orders. He obeys, gaze falling down to find hers, eyes locking together. “Keep looking at me. Slow breaths. Slow.”

“I don’t know” – he winces, grunts breathlessly – “if I can do this.”

Being half-human, she realizes. He’s talking about being half-human.

He hasn’t discussed it at all, not once, now two months into this new hybrid existence. Hasn’t let her see his struggle, coming to terms with this new part of himself.

“Doctor, you can do this.  _We_ can do this. Now, with me,” she says, sucking in a slow breath, blowing it out between  her lips. His eyes stay locked to hers, and the second inhale she takes, his shallow breathing begins to mirror hers. Slows down enough so that he isn’t hyperventilating. His heartbeat is frighteningly fast, but regular nonetheless. “Again.”

Ninety seconds of slow breathing later, the wild panic has faded from the Doctor’s eyes. His heart is slowing down, his face gradually changing from crimson to pink.

“Overexertion,” Rose says, reaching up to brush his hair, plastered with sweat and dust, away from his forehead. “Followed by a mild panic attack.”

He pushes himself up onto his elbows, then fully upright. “Is that your professional diagnosis?”

“Field medic training, before the Dimension Cannon project officially launched. It comes in handy, on occasion.” There’s a scar on her inner thigh – the Doctor had noticed it in bed, traced it with his finger, kissed it with his lips – but he didn’t ask how she’d gotten it, why the stitches had been so rough they left little dotted scars along its edges.

Rose’s head falls forward, resting on his shoulder. “I swear, Doctor, if you ever do anything like that to me again – if you  _scare_ me like that again –”

One of his hands slides up her back, grips the cotton fabric of her shirt just below her shoulderblade. “How ever did you keep up, for all those years? All that running, and I never stopped to think how much it taxed your weak human physiology, never imagined the agony you were in. It’s a wonder you didn’t collapse on our first trip out, right in front of Cassandra.”

Rose laughs and sits up, rolling her eyes. “We manage just fine.  _You’ll_  manage just fine.”

He rests his right hand on the left side of his own chest. Then he reaches out with his left hand, touches her chest just over her heart. “I’d thought it was bad, the first time we had intercourse, the way my heart was pounding. But this is a normal feeling during vigorous exertion, then? For a human, I mean. All this wild fluttering and – and erratic breathing?”

“Mmm, no backup systems to speak of. So yeah, you have to learn to pace yourself. But we can increase your endurance. Start you on a regimen of cardio training. It’ll help.”

“Cardio?” he repeats, arching his eyebrow at her. “What’s that?”

Rose waves her hand. “You know – exercise for your heart. A trot around the block, swimming laps in the pool, that sort of thing.”

The Doctor leans forward a bit, his forehead knit in thought. “So vigorous intercourse, that would help with my cardio training.” Both his eyebrows shoot up, his eyes brightening with the earnest enthusiasm of a kid who’s just been offered an enormous lollipop. “If we fuck  _really hard_?”

Laughter bursts out of her – shock at the vulgarity, at how very human it is; and also how he’s still so alien, grappling with these new concepts like they’re the most wonderful toys.

The cavern shakes once more, shale rattling down the slope. As if on cue, the tracking device the Doctor had been carrying, which ended up on the rocks when he collapsed, flickers to life. He’d built it this morning at the hotel – pieced together from parts of an espresso machine, a flatscreen telly, a faucet, and spoons from the buffet. It blinks bright orange.

There’s a distant boom overhead, somewhere through layers of rock on the surface.

“That’ll be the statue of Phillip III getting reduced to slag,” the Doctor says, hopping to his feet and brushing dust off his pants before he scoops up the blinking device. “Good thing Pietro Tacca isn’t around to see that – he was cranky about anyone touching his work. There were originally five bronze Moors, and it wasn’t my fault, I swear, it just toppled right off Pietro’s balcony, and I was the one who convinced Ferdinand di’Medici there should be  _four_  Moors at the base of his fountain instead, which really worked out for the best, in terms of symmetry. I never did understand why Pietro banned me from his workshop.”

Rose taps the device. “Doctor? Focus.”

“Right, right! Just that way,” he says, pointing into the pitch darkness ahead of them. Rose shines her torch in that direction. “Shouldn’t be far. Think you can keep up, Blondie?” 

There’s something about the way that nickname comes out of his mouth that reminds Rose so much of Donna, her chest constricts and her smile is tighter than she means it to be. “Always.”

The Doctor grins back at her, snatching her hand and pulling her along. “We know what they’re after, now!”

The black cavern, the bobbing torch beams, the clattering rocks and distant explosions — glitches. Shudders. Shatters.

When Rose’s eyes open, she  _does_ know what the grey man in the corner is after. 

Every single memory it has called up has been about the Doctor, specifically his moments of vulnerability. Of doubt. Of need. The grey man is doing research, using Rose’s memories to catalogue chinks in the Doctor’s armor.


	6. Chapter 6

Rose is in the fetal position in the middle of the room. She sits up, fixes her eyes on the ceiling until she catches sight of the grey man in her peripheral vision, directly to her left.

Pushing herself to her feet, she turns to face it. “How long is this going to go on? Because I’ve got a good sixty or so years left in me, and if we’re in for the long haul, I’d like to know.”

The low, pitchy hissing comes from its side of the room, and the gravelly translator kicks in again: “Prepare yourself, human.”

Rose takes a step back, toward the opposite side of the cell. The bra she’s in is old – one where the underwire has poked its way out, and she should’ve put in the bin long ago, but never got around to doing it. Most days, she ended up shoving the underwire back into place over and over again and wondering why she perpetually put the thing back in her lingerie drawer instead of tossing it. But today, with the underwire digging into her right armpit, she’s trying to decide how long it would take her to yank the underwire out all the way, if she needs to use that bit of metal as some kind of defensive weapon.

“Shift is occurring,” the translator drones at her.

Before she can make a decision about the underwire or puzzle out what “shift” could possibly mean, the room tilts. More accurately, the center of gravity in the room shifts, and Rose finds herself falling backward onto what was (up until a moment ago) the wall. The grey man stays in its corner, which is now on the ceiling, its attention still fixated on her.

She groans, her eyes shutting instinctively as pain blossoms across the back of her head, her scalp stinging and her skull ringing. Feeling carefully for blood, she rolls onto all fours.

“Really, that was the least useful warning you could’ve possibly given me. ‘Stand up against that wall’ would’ve been much more helpful.”

The small port, which had been in the ceiling but is now in the wall, hisses and pops and slides open.

Rose is on her feet, her thoughts sharpening in an instant. Whatever’s outside the room is dark – darker than the cell, at least. But there’s movement, rustling and staccato, guttural language.

Another alien ducks into the room through the portal, but this one’s not the same as the tall, thin grey man lurking in the corner. This one doesn’t have a perception filter, for starters. He’s only just taller than Rose, his skin paper-white, hair the same color, covering his scalp in pin-curls. When he lifts his head, his blood-red eyes freeze Rose, freeze any thought she might have of trying to push past him through that door.

“Human,” he says, by way of greeting. “I am the Shadow Architect, appointed judge of the Shadow Proclamation.”

“Shadow –” Rose echoes the word in disbelief. “You’re supposed to be some sort of law and order for the universe, aren’t you? What’re you doing, holding a sentient being prisoner without proper trial, without even telling them why they’re being held?” She gestures at the ceiling, at the grey man. “Sending in interrogators whose methods wouldn’t be condoned on any civilized world?”

“Shadow Proclamation article four thousand and twenty-two states that any member of a species designated as war criminals” – he lifts a hand, gestures toward Rose – “and their associates, are not entitled to the civil liberties otherwise accorded to sentient species in our justice system.”

“Since when has the human race been designated as war criminals?” Rose says, her voice pitched high. She takes a deep breath, trying not to clench her hands into fists, trying to calm herself down, because the more hysterical she is in front of this person, the less he’s going to listen to her.

“Your presence in this detention facility falls under the associates clause of article four thousand and twenty-two.”

“Which species of war criminal am I supposed to have associated with?” Rose’s mind is racing, thinking through all the aliens she and the Doctor have confronted over the past few years; thinking of the aliens she’d had contact with before the Doctor arrived, during her work on the Dimension Cannon project. Scouring her memories for anything particularly sordid, trying to decide whether Pharaxxian Battle-Snails qualified as  _war criminals_ – because in spite of their name, they were actually the kindest and most peace-loving creatures Rose had ever come across. Plus, they gave her a very slow ride home, after that entire kerfuffle was over.

“There has been no trace of Dalek or Time Lord in the universe for millennia, but during the last few solar cycles, we have begun receiving reports of a native of Gallifrey living on Earth.”

Rose’s mouth snaps shut, her bare skin tingling like the temperature in the room has dropped to freezing. Because it seems fairly likely that  _chosen life-partner_ and  _shagging like rabbits_ fall under the “associates” clause.

“Article four thousand twenty-two, subsection B, paragraph delta, designates any member of any species that participated in the Time War as war criminals, eligible to be held without charge or trial as long as the Shadow Architect sees fit.”

“The Doctor – he’s got a name. He’s an individual, not just a tiny part of a faceless mass of a species. And he  _didn’t_  participate in the Time War that happened here,” Rose immediately retorts. It’s quite true, technically – he didn’t participate in this universe’s version of it; he wasn’t the one who activated the doomsday device that sealed Daleks and Time Lords alike into a time lock. Not in  _this_  reality.

“Whether or not he participated is immaterial. He is of Gallifreyan blood,” the Shadow Architect replies placidly, shaking his head as though trying to teach a particularly stubborn, uninformed child. “Therefore the designation applies. You have given us valuable information, for which we thank you. The Time Lord has arrived at our detention facility for processing – he surrendered willingly, and quite peacefully, once we explained the charges against him. His only condition was your freedom, a commutation of your conviction and sentence.”

“What?” There is so much information flooding her brain, and she’s so exhausted from the last – week? two? she’s lost track – that Rose is feeling like she’s missing something. Some bit of logic or reality that would make rational sense of everything happening right now.

 _He’s got a blood and anger and revenge kind of problem,_ Rose thinks. The words she said to the grey man – her interrogator – when she first arrived. She’s been helping them build a case against the Doctor from day one.

She is so frustrated, so incensed, so overcome with the need to scream and shake the albino alien in front of her, that hot tears well in her eyes.

Blinking them back, she manages, “That’s not right. Conviction without trial, just because of where someone’s from. You don’t know him. You don’t know anything about him, except for a single thing: Time Lord. Have you tested his DNA? Have you made sure?”

It’s a technicality, a potential loophole, but that half-human half-Donna part of the Doctor — the part he struggles with so often — maybe that’s going to save his life.

The albino alien doesn’t blink. “You will be processed and released back to Earth, once the Time Lord’s sentence has been carried out and he’s secure in cryogenic stasis. As long as you do not associate with war criminals in the future, you shall not see us again. If you have questions about the information I have given you, or need clarification on any point, you may contact our sentient being rights’ group after your return to your native planet.

“Again, the Shadow Proclamation thanks you for your cooperation in the apprehension of a dangerous criminal.”

The Shadow Architect turns around and steps through the hatch, into the dark corridor.


	7. Chapter 7

“Where do you think you’re going?!” Rose shouts after the Shadow Architect. The door makes its mechanical popping noise and she dashes forward, hurtling through the opening a split-second before it closes, leaving the grey man alone in the cell.

She has so much momentum she can’t stop, and ends up slamming directly into a stone wall. Well, what  _feels_ like a stone wall – it makes a low growling noise, and a meaty, gloved appendage clamps down on her bare shoulder.

Rubbing her forehead where it had smacked into this … thing, she looks up to find she’s bowled into a rhinoceros. A rhinoceros in a black armor.

Rose has, she decides instantly, seen weirder things in her relatively short life.

“Sorry,” she says, stepping back, patting ineffectually at the small dent she left in its chestpiece.

It barks a string of syllables at her, staccato and sharp and unintelligible.

The Shadow Architect wheels around, robe swirling and small creases forming across his otherwise smooth forehead. Bright crimson eyes narrow at her. “Disturbance will not be tolerated, human. We do not wish to use force, but if you will not peaceably return to your confinement area, we shall do what is necessary.”

Rose glances down the corridor both ways – this holding facility is nothing like the stasis prison facility in her dream of the future-that-won’t-be, the one with the elderly Doctor. These hallways are clean and relatively well-lit; there are no grey men lurking anywhere, hissing or following her under the floor grating.

There are only three rhinoceros in uniform, the Shadow Architect, and a seemingly never-ending corridor of cell doors.

“At least let me say goodbye,” Rose says, her attention swiveling back to the Shadow Architect. “Your grey man – the dream-watcher — he showed you my memories, didn’t he?”

The Shadow Architect’s eyes stay narrow, his head tilting forward a fraction in the smallest of nods.

“Then you know what the Doctor – the Time Lord – and I am, to each other. I’m not a criminal, have been exonerated, you said so yourself. I have some rights, don’t I? Like the right to say goodbye before my life partner’s sentence is carried out.”

The Shadow Architect doesn’t move for an eternal moment – like he’s carved from stone, immutable and devoid of expression. Eventually he admits, grudgingly, “This situation is … unprecedented. We have not had to enact Article Four Thousand Twenty-Two, Subsection B, Paragraph Delta since it was drafted into law, because it was created in the wake of the Time War, after every last Dalek and Time Lord had vanished from all of time and space. The Shadow Architect at the time, she meant the article to be a condemnation of the war, how it devastated the higher species of the universe, how infernally destructive and corrupt both sides were by the end of all things. So we are on … untrod ground, in this case.”

“Let me say goodbye,” Rose says, reaching out a hand in supplication. “As an act of kindness, a show of mercy. And I’ll return to my cell – and to Earth – peacefully.”

Pulling in a deep, put-upon sigh, the Shadow Architect does his fractional nod once more. “Very well. The Time Lord was on his way to the stasis chamber when I left to inform you of my judgment in the case. You may say your goodbyes; whether the Time Lord will be capable of responding or not, I cannot guarantee. Our stasis techs are wonderfully efficient.” He draws up the sides of his mouth in a grim, condescending smile.

There is a sliver of ice, piercing Rose’s spine from the base of her skull to her tailbone.  _She’s already too late._

“Thank you,” she says through numb lips. She has to get back to Earth, to Torchwood. She’s going to need a ship, and intelligence on the Shadow Proclamation. And suddenly that dream of the future-that-won’t-be, the elderly Doctor who slaughters dozens of guards on his way in to rescue her from a stasis prison facility – everything’s reversed, in that timeline. Rose is the one who’s spent a lifetime trying to find him again, and when she does, he’s still young. So very, very alive. And she’s nearly dead.

But she’s done this before – lost him and found him again – she will do it again, if she has to. Even though the thought makes her weary to her marrow, brings despair welling from her soul.

The Shadow Architect turns around and begins walking down the hallway, robes swaying side-to-side placidly. The rhinoceros guard, the one with his gloved paw still clamped on her shoulder, steps behind her and gives her a nudge.

Rose stumbles forward, hands clenching and unclenching. She crosses her arms over her chest, her left fingers beginning to work the exposed underwire out of the right side of her bra. She has no idea what she could possibly do with it, but once she gets to the place where they’ve got the Doctor cryogenically stored, maybe she can – pick a lock, or smash some glass, or do  _something_ that will help her not feel so infinitely helpless and adrift.

Every time she blinks her eyes, she sees a featureless white wall, feels the solid thump of it against her palm, feels the suffocating despair and sorrow in her chest, her own voice shrill and hysterical in her ears:  _Take me back!_

It’s nearly paralyzing, that memory.

She somehow forces her feet to move. Forces her fingers to keep working, pulling the wire out.

They walk for so long, Rose loses track of how many turns they’ve taken, how many miles of corridor they’ve gone through. But at a certain point they emerge from the prison section of the facility and enter corridors of offices, filled with species of all kinds bustling here and there, arms and tentacles full of equipment and papers. Some species Rose knows the names of, most she doesn’t.

The last bit of metal slides out of her bra, and she clutches the underwire in her left hand so tightly, it cuts into her fingers and palm. The pain sharpens her concentration, helps her focus on what’s happening around her.

By the time they reach a main atrium of sorts – soaring glass ceiling at least a dozen stories high; stairs and alien lifts that seem to run on some sort of system of magnets; a small indoor park area, complete with trees and grass – her feet are aching. She’s about to ask how much farther they have to walk, but before she can open her mouth a wailing klaxon begins to sound.

Everyone – human, alien and otherwise – momentarily freezes in shock, looks up at the ceiling, at the speakers producing the noise.

Without hesitation, Rose takes off running for the lift, practically whooping with joy. Ear-splitting as it is, the klaxon is the most beautiful thing Rose has ever heard, because she doesn’t have a single doubt as to who is responsible for it.

The rhinoceros guards instantly whirl around, one of them snatching a communication device of some kind from his hip and barking those guttural syllables into a speaker. The other two come thundering after her, and it’s terrifying, the hammering of their feet on the ground, the way everyone else scatters out of their rampaging path. They’re remarkably fast, for such a large species; they’re all muscle under that thick, rough hide.

Rose’s advantage is in her size; even if she isn’t faster, she’s a far sight smaller. Veering right, she ducks into the park area, dashing across the grass and through bushes, dodging between the trees like a dancer performing a routine. The guards blunder after her, stomping over the bushes and struggling to make it through the densest stands of trees, wasting time circumventing them instead.

The bank of lifts isn’t far, and Rose is squinting at the control panel from a distance, trying to get an idea of how they might operate – she won’t have time to figure out a computer system once she gets there, and they don’t look like they work on simple buttons like their Earth counterparts.

The klaxon stutters, crackles so loud Rose’s ears are ringing afterward, and everyone else is clutching the sides of their head (or wherever their species happens to keep their aural sensors) in pain. And then the alarm falls silent.

There’s the sound of someone muttering, a few buttons being pressed with wild, random enthusiasm, and then the Doctor’s voice booms out of the emergency speakers.

“Paging one Rose Tyler. Miss Tyler, this ill-tempered computer terminal informs me you have already left your cell.” She can practically hear the proud grin in his voice. “Please report to deck thirty-three, if you would be so kind.” There’s a pop, a burst of static. “And now we return to your regularly scheduled program.”

The deafening klaxon blares over the speakers again. 


	8. Chapter 8

Rose reaches the lifts just as the guards blunder out of the park and pick up speed again, charging directly at her. Their heads are lowered, just like rhinoceros from Earth would if they were planning to head-butt something into nonexistence.

Terror claws at the base of her stomach, climbing straight up her esophagus, because she has no desire whatsoever to find out what happens if they actually catch her – whether they ram her right into the wall or haul her back to that grey cell or something worse.

She’s staring at the computer panel that controls the lifts, at the alien script and bizarre colors, and reaches out to push any and every part of the touchscreen just for the sake of doing  _something._ Before she can, the nearest lift door opens, and a horde of creatures walk, slide, and crawl off, eyestalks swiveling to look at her.

Practically climbing over them, she slips onto the lift, takes a quick look at the computer terminal and makes an educated guess as to which button indicates the forty-third floor, and pushes it. Because of course the Doctor  _said_  to meet him on the thirty-third floor, but he doesn’t actually  _mean_  the thirty-third floor.

The Doctor had spent hours arguing with Jackie Tyler, going round and round about the issue of his human age. He was certain he didn’t look a day over twenty-five, and Jackie swore up and down, loudly and often, that he was thirty-three.

Rose tried to keep out of the entire conversation.

Until one day, Pete brought home a tabloid (something he usually never did, because being the Vitex multi-billionaire, with a wife who was miraculously resurrected from a fatal Cyber-conversion, and a fully-grown daughter who miraculously appeared out of thin air in Norway, has made the Tylers quite the focus of media attention in this universe). But this tabloid’s front page photo and accompanying headline, in particular, had caught his attention:  _Tyler Heiress and New Beau Caught Snogging At Henrik’s Grand Re-Opening._

This universe’s Henriks had, through no alien intervention whatsoever, burned to the ground. In a fit of nostalgia during a shopping trip, Rose and the Doctor had most decidedly christened at least one changing room. Maybe more than one.

The article went on to declare, most assertively, that Rose’s  _new, mysterious beau_ was forty-four. And then called their relationship a spring-winter romance. The next day at a family supper, Jackie presented the Doctor with a birthday cake, forty-four blazing candles atop it. It set off the fire alarm in the kitchen.

The Doctor vanished from the raucous gathering a while later, and Rose eventually tracked him down in the guest bath. Fully-clothed in a dry bathtub, he was lying prone, his long legs bent and feet flat up against the tiled wall at one end. Jackie’s pink hand mirror was in his hand, and he was staring bleakly at his face.

“I’m nine hundred and nine years old,” he said, without looking at her.

She stood over the bathtub, staring down at him. “Budge up.”

He sat up, leaning forward, and Rose slipped into the bath behind him. She wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his torso. He leaned back against her chest, bringing the mirror up. 

“Forty-four is the new thirty-three,” she told him, pressing her lips against his ear — the lopsided one, the one he pulled on when he was nervous. She settled her chin on his shoulder, so their faces were next to each other, and stared into the mirror with him. “Since when have numbers mattered with us, anyway? Nine hundred and nine, forty-four, thirty-three, I don’t care.”

He stared at her reflection, brown eyes so incredibly ancient, set in his very human face, razor-burned jaw and slightly chapped lips. “What would you do if you found out you only had one year left to live, Rose? How could you fit everything into such a short period of time?”

“Ah.” Rose closed her eyes, leaned against the side of his head, nuzzling his sideburn. There were many things about this new, confined, semi-human existence that the Doctor found stifling; the distinct lack of regenerations was not something he’d been willing to discuss yet. 

The Doctor wasn’t wrong, in his comparison: a Time Lord’s existence, reduced to a human life span, would be like a human finding out they had a matter of months to live. 

Rose tightened her legs around him, bringing her right hand across his chest and resting her palm atop his single beating heart. She met his gaze in the tiny mirror. “After six months on the Dimension Cannon project, I found my first grey hair,” she murmured into his ear. “To this day, when I’m alone at the flat, I take a pair of tweezers and pull them all out, those grey hairs. They keep growing back, though. More of them every time.”

The Doctor lifts the mirror higher, so he can inspect both their scalps.  

“When you get your first grey hair, I’ll stop plucking. We’ll let them grow in together,” she told him.

The Doctor made a small sound, something between a snort and a laugh. Dropping the mirror into his lap, he leaned his head back onto her shoulder, his neck stretching long, and stared up at the ceiling. They were both silent for a long time, feeling each other breathe, listening to the distant hum of the air conditioning.

“Forty-four is the new thirty-three,” the Doctor eventually said.

“It’s scientific fact,” Rose replied.

“So obviously I’m going to start eating ice cream for breakfast.”

“Obviously, we both are.”

It was a joke between them, after that – forty-four being the new thirty-three. So, Rose is fairly certain she should be heading for the forty-fourth floor of the Shadow Proclamation facility, not thirty-three. The lift is shooting upward at a startling speed, and she’s pushed the button for the forty-third floor, because that way if security is tracking her in this elevator, she can slip up the stairs to the forty-fourth, to throw anyone off her trail long enough to find the Doctor.

The little indicator lights on the panel light up as lift ascends, and when the forty-third light flickers from orange to purple, the doors silently slide open.

The corridor beyond is blessedly empty. This looks like it might be some kind of living quarters – cheerful little lights outside of each door, tiny porthole-sized windows here and there. Still gripping her piece of wire, Rose slips into the hallway, begins making her way toward the area she remembers the stairwell being, when she was down in the atrium.

The pristine white stairwell, with its acrylic-like stairs, is deserted. And because the stairs are somewhat transparent, and the surfaces amplify sound instead of dampening it, Rose can see them several floors below: dark shapes, accompanied by grunting, staccato language, feet pounding as they head upward.

They can’t have seen her – she  _tells_  herself they can’t have, at least – as she slips through the door for the forty-fourth floor and closes it quietly behind her. Another deserted hallway, the faint sound of the klaxon wailing in the distance.

Rose darts away from the stairwell door, toward the elevator. The layout on this floor is a bit different than the one immediately below, and she gets turned around. She’s focusing so hard on orienting herself, she nearly walks right past it.

A grey man, standing in the middle of a corridor running perpendicular to the one she’s dashing down. Dark and still, only its head swiveling to watch her flit past. 

Rose nearly skids to a stop, the sight registering in her peripheral vision. Her steps slow, she turns her head, because a hissing noise starts up, low and gravelly just around the corner she just passed, and there isn’t a translator to kick in, make sense of the hair-raising noise. The hissing grows louder as the grey man draws nearer to the corner, its hand extending and lengthy fingers wrapping around the side of the wall.

Rose is so preoccupied, gearing up to make a dash for it, she runs directly into the person standing in front of her.

“You’re in your knickers!”

There’s a split-second her brain doesn’t properly process the arms wrapping around her, blue pinstripes pressed against her face. A noise comes from her mouth, inarticulate, something between relief and joy and panic, something vaguely hysterical. She throws her arms up around his shoulders; she’d climb him if she could, she’s clinging to him like he’s a life raft. He grunts at the pressure she’s exerting around his ribs, as she squeezes the breath right out of him. The cold metal of the sonic screwdriver presses into her back as he picks her up, her feet swinging back and forth, before putting her down again.

“Did they – did they do anything to you? Rose?”

It registers, then, that the Doctor is worried about the state of her clothes. Which is the furthest thing from Rose’s mind at the moment. “It’s coming, around the corner!” 

“Oh, she’s a friendly,” the Doctor replies. Rose’s head snaps up, she looks into his face. He’s beaming at her, all dimples and cheeks and teeth. He’s got at least a week’s worth of beard growth, and his hair is a righteous mess, and he’s gorgeous.

His gaze tears away from hers, and he lifts a hand to wave jauntily at the grey creature –  _female_  creature – behind them. When he opens his mouth, he does a fair imitation of the hissing noise, from deep in the back of his throat. The grey lady answers.

“She’s a Happatian. They get drafted into service for the Shadow Proclamation in this universe – really quite horrid, the way they’re treated – and she wants me to tell you she’s sorry. For reading your memories.” The Doctor strokes Rose’s back. “But it helped her find me in the end. She was in love, and then she was drafted, and she hasn’t seen him for a hundred and sixty-eight solar years. So she felt a bit sympathetic, because apparently you were dreaming about me.”

The Doctor’s grinning at her again, tinged with smugness this time, as though he’s still delightedly surprised to find out she’s utterly in love with him, years on.  

“I – I thought she was a  _he_ ,” Rose says, and it’s a ridiculous thing to fixate on, of the myriad things happening right now. But her brain fixates on it anyway, her head pressing against the Doctor’s chest.

He smells like himself – spice and hair gel and a touch of perspiration – and atop that is the scent of machinery, of chemical residue, burning carbon. It’s the remnants of whatever he went through to get here, to this hallway, with his arms around her. It’s beautiful, that smell.

Rose twists her head around to regard the grey lady behind them. “Thanks.”

The grey figure, still veiled behind a perception filter, hisses again.

“She says we ought to go,” the Doctor murmurs. “The Judoon guards are only one floor down.” He waves at her again, hisses something in reply.

Then he lets go of Rose, takes her hand and they start jogging down the corridor. “Do you trust me?”

She glances at him, at the way he’s lifting the sonic screwdriver and pointing it toward the bulkhead in front of them. There is something familiar in the gesture, a terrifying recall of her elderly and violent Doctor performing the same gesture in an unrealized timeline.

“Always,” she replies, only barely trips over the middle syllable, over memories of the vacuum of space, of not being able to breathe, of losing consciousness in the Doctor’s arms. “But I think — this didn’t turn out well last time!”

Shooting her a sidelong look, forehead wrinkled in confusion, he shouts, “Hold on tight!” Long fingers grip her hand so hard her knuckles crack. “Exhale!”

She obeys instinctively, pushes all the breath from her lungs. The sonic buzzes, and there’s a loud beeping from the opposite side of the wall. Right afterward, the wall collapses, and it isn’t so much an explosion as a disintegration. The white surface dissolves, bits and chunks getting sucked outside into blackness and  _ohgod it’s happening again, it’s happening –_

Rose doesn’t have time to say anything, to object, to balk – there’s a percussive booming sound, the same as before ( _as never happened, as won’t ever happen_ ), atmosphere meeting vacuum. Her feet falter, but it doesn’t matter, because the air behind them whooshes forward, escaping in a cloud of dust and gas. The Doctor and Rose are carried right along with it.

They pass through the bulkhead just a split-second before a shield pops into place behind them, some kind of containment field. Their momentum carries them past another glowing barrier, a short distance away from the Shadow Proclamation facility – a proper shield, Rose would guess, something to deflect weapons or ships, but apparently not organic matter.

She can’t breathe – again. Her skin is agony, her eyes feel like they’re going to bulge right out of her head, she tries to control the way her body wants to wiggle, but can’t.

She looks down and her panic turns into abject terror: she’s lost the Doctor this time. His hand is gone.

He’s a dozen feet from her, well out of reach, getting further away by the millisecond. There’s nothing to slow either one of them down, no atmosphere to halt their momentum; they keep moving away from each other, and the Shadow Proclamation facility, at a steady speed. They’ll keep moving this way for an infinity, until the universe ends or one of them falls into a star.

The Doctor’s brown eyes are wide with horror, and he’s flailing, trying to reach her. But there’s nothing to push off of, this isn’t water, it’s a vacuum. No way to move without some sort of propulsion.

His gaze meets hers, his lips open soundlessly.  _Rose._

He reaches into his pocket, pulls out some sort of device, tech she isn’t familiar with.

_I’m sorry._

He presses a button, and vanishes in the flare of a transmat beam.

Rose can’t scream. She can’t control what’s happening, or where she’s going. Her vision gives out – something about the lack of pressure and her eyes and they simply stop working – and three seconds after blackness covers her sight, she loses consciousness.


	9. Chapter 9

Someone is punching her chest.

There’s quite a bit of yelling, too, unhappy and angry, and then more hitting.

“Not supposed to let go!” Fast, rhythmic thumps. Words that sound like gibberish – _Gallifreyan —_ and by the harsh tone, someone’s getting told off in no uncertain terms. “Even with the transmat controls getting jammed, it was only thirty-one seconds out there, that was  _it_ , I counted it down to the  _millisecond_ , should be  _fine._ Never met a stronger human, strong lungs, hard head.” More hitting. “So  _breathe,_ Rose Tyler!”

_THUMP_

She does, chest convulsively filling with air. It burns, and it feels fantastic, all at the same time.

“Ha  _HA_! That’s my brilliant girl! Keep that up, nice and steady! Medbay, right! Up we go!”

Arms slide beneath her, air moves past her face. Then she’s falling, right into blackness again, and the voice recedes to silence.

When she opens her eyes, the room isn’t in focus. She blinks, squints, and the hazy edge on everything gradually fades. She’s in a distinctly alien room, chrome and steel and an array of bizarre-looking equipment surrounding her cot. She’s mummified in a ridiculous number of blankets – half a dozen at least, and before she thinks about it, she’s kicking them off, shoving them onto the floor. Underneath the blankets, she’s dressed in some sort of robe, loose and orange and completely ridiculous looking.

“Oi! Those are there for a reason.”

Her head rolls to the side. The Doctor’s hopping up from a chair beside the cot, leaning over her. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Rose blinks at him, at the fact that he’s got his pinky and middle fingers pointed toward her face. “Two.” The word croaks out of her sore throat.

“Good! Vision’s right as rain.” A grin flashes across his face. He reaches for a glass of water, and she comes up onto her elbows to drink. “Next up, mental faculties. Final Jeopardy, for the all-expense paid trip to Bermuda: what’s the nineteenth digit of pi?”

Rose’s wide eyes narrow to a squint. “Blueberry.”

“Actually, it’s eight. But blueberry’s close enough. I suppose you won’t need a brain transplant. They can do those, y’know, on Cerebellex Four, take all your grey meat and put it into another living vessel. Illegal, of course – because not many living vessels are willing to have their brain scooped out to make room for the new one, let me tell you. And if you have a disreputable surgeon you might wake up in the body of a fire-lynx. Then you’re a pariah at parties, because every time a fire-lynx sneezes, everything within a five foot radius goes right up  –”

His babbling is cut off when she reaches out with stiff fingers and snags the front of his oxford – he’s shucked his pinstriped jacket and tie, he’s got his shirtsleeves rolled up and his collar unbuttoned. His hair is sticking straight up on one side, like he’s been leaning against something and sleeping.

“You left me. You left me floating out there. In space.”

He stares down at her, every ounce of forced joviality draining from his expression. “I had to get back to the ship. To the transmat controls. My remote activation unit was equipped to transport us both, but it required physical contact to work properly. I –“ His face bends, mouth turning down and eyebrows drawing together. “I thought I had you, but I let go.”

There’s a muscle twitching along the stubble-covered line of his jaw.

Rose tugs at his shirt again. “I’m cold.”

Gaze darting to the blankets on the floor, his frustration flares – he’s frustrated with himself,  _furious_ with himself, she can see it clearly in his expression, in the way his neck is straining. “Rose, you just kicked the blankets –”

“I’m cold.” Rose tugs at him, and this time he understands. Squeezes onto the medical cot with her, small as it is. His arms slide around her and she wiggles as close as she can, stretches against him, nose-to-nose on the pillow. 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I had it planned, down to the nanosecond. We were even _ahead_  of schedule, because you were brilliant enough to have already broken out of your cell! As soon as we got past the ship’s shields, I was going to hit the transmat button and we’d be two systems away, outside the range of their sensors. And I let go of your hand. It was my fault.” His fingers curl, fingernails scraping gently along the curve of her waist. His eyes close and he swallows.

“I’m okay now, am I?” she asks. He nods, a small movement. “And we’re safe enough for now, are we?” Another nod. Drawing in a slow breath, she tips her face forward, rests her forehead against his. “Nothing to be sorry for, then.”

“Did they – did they do anything to you?”

“Fed me terrible-tasting oatmeal. Watched my memories like they were movies.” It’s her turn now, a swallow.

His arms tighten around her. “I woke up in Geneva and you were gone. Vanished into thin air. Three weeks of frantic searching, every Torchwood and UNIT resource, every bit of Pete’s influence brought to bear, and there was no trace.”

“How long was I gone?”

“Four months.”

The information stuns her, a blow to her gut; she can’t breathe. The Doctor’s eyes open and he searches her face, like the creases around her eyes and the corners of her lips are script he can decipher.

“They had me sedated for months,” she says aloud as she realizes it. “Because the Happatian, the interrogation, it only lasted a week, maybe two.”

“They contacted Earth three months ago, demanding my surrender. It was the only reason I was able to find you.”

Which meant that, no matter how clever and impressive and fantastic he is, the Doctor had come up short. The guilt of his inadequacy is eating him alive; it’s obvious in the depths of his eyes, in the set of his mouth. She feels it in the tension of his body alongside hers.

Rose spent years trying to get back to him, across the Void. Even without having seen a future-that-never-will-be, an elderly Doctor freeing her from a stasis prison, she knows he would have done the same.

Bringing her hand up, she places it alongside his cheek, slips her fingers into his hair. “Of course you refused.”

“At first. Until we’d exhausted every other avenue of locating you.”

“So they had me – sedated, in stasis, or something – for  _three months_ before they thawed me out and started interrogating me.”

“Which would have been the same time I came into custody,” the Doctor agrees, frowning. “The same time they started interrogating me, before they went through that mockery of a trial.”

“Did the Happatian examine your dreams, too?”

He shakes his head, taps his temple. “Happatian techniques don’t work on other telepathic species, unless they gain consent. Which I certainly did not give. Although if the Happatian was extracting information from you at the same time, it certainly would explain the precise nature of the techniques the Shadow Architect  _did_  use in questioning me.”

 _Oh god._ They  _were_  using her to find his weaknesses, to exploit them. Rose draws away, covers her mouth, closes her eyes. “I’m sorry, oh god,  _oh my god_ , was it terrible?”

He plucks her hand away from her face, presses a soft kiss to the corner of her mouth. “You couldn’t have stopped what they were doing, Rose. And  _anyway_ ” – that word is louder than the other ones, louder than it should be – “it’s all done, in the past. Here we are!”

She makes a small noise in the back of her throat, a combination of anger and shame and unhappiness.

“Aren’t you going to ask the obvious question?” the Doctor prods.

She lets the intentional change of conversation pull her away from the dark spiral of thoughts she was mired in, cracks open her eyes. He’s staring at her in anticipation, as though he’s already delighted with her cleverness. Her thoughts race for a few silent seconds, until she lifts her eyebrows and casts her gaze around the room. “So … where are we?”

“I nicked one of the Shadow Proclamation’s exploratory vessels!” he says with pride, his eyes twinkling. “She’s not bad, as far as ships go. Got some interesting equipment aboard for charting new areas of the galaxy, finding new worlds to bring under the umbrella of the Proclamation’s  _benevolent_  justice.”

“Grand theft auto?”

He shrugs, still grinning. “Add it to my rap sheet.”

“My delinquent alien.” Rose grins back, tongue pressing against her teeth. “Nicked a ship and a prisoner all in one fell swoop. Impressive.”

“’Course I am,” he replies. “I’m brilliant.”

“We’re alone, then?”

“Jake wanted to come. I wouldn’t let him. Didn’t want him caught up in this mess.”

“So it’s just us.”

A nod. “Yep.” He pops the  _p_ sound, and it’s such a familiar, happy noise, her chest expands and her cheeks start to ache.

“Good. Better with two.”

“Always.” He pauses. “We can’t go back to Earth. Not for a while. Your mum was livid about that bit. She tossed her favorite tea mug right across the kitchen, shattered it. Called me quite a few names, went through her usual litany and right into some Americanisms. ‘Dickhead’ is weird, isn’t it? Is it meant to indicate the individual’s cranium actually resembles a male sexual organ, or that one’s mental capacity is –”

Rose interrupts him with a small snort of laughter, because he’s on the verge of launching into a ridiculously literal etymological dissection of the word; and at the same time the entire situation is terrible, leaving her mum again. It hurts. The thought of Pete and Tony, of their friends they won’t meet at the pub on Tuesday nights. “What’s the plan, then?”

“Recuperation,” the Doctor replies, rubbing small circles around her shoulder blade. “I have to be certain you aren’t suffering from decompression sickness, so nothing strenuous for at least twenty-four hours.”

“Twelve hours.”

“Eighteen.”

“Fine.” She pokes her tongue out at him. “And after eighteen hours?”

“Well-l-l-l, I thought we might take this new ship out for a test ride around the galaxy. She’s got trans-warp drive, and we haven’t been off-planet in a while.”

The truth is, they’ve been Earth-bound since Bad Wolf Bay. The Doctor has borne confinement relatively well, but there have been moments when domesticity and laundry and grocery shopping finally got to him, half a dozen incidents where he commandeered various kinds of vehicles and dragged her to various ends of the planet. A zeppelin to the heart of the South American rainforest (she let him bring home the tamarin —  _just look at its brilliant beard, Rose!_  — which was a mistake, in retrospect), a sno-cat across the Antarctic tundra (they ended up stranded by blizzards in the hut at Fossil Bluff for two months), a jet-boat around the Cape of Good hope (remarkably incident-free, aside from the Doctor diving head-first into a pod of dolphins and Rose having to fish him out after he’d exhausted himself an hour later); a crashed spaceship piloted out of Torchwood’s impound lot and flown on one ailing engine to San Francisco (more than one close call over the Pacific, as they drained the damaged power cells completely dry).

Rose won’t deny the idea of standing on alien soil, breathing alien air, it sends shivers of excitement to her toes. “I’d like that.”

“And afterward, or maybe during – de _pend_ ing on how things work out – we’ll depose the current Shadow Architect.”

The Doctor says it so lightly, with such assurance, as though he’s talking about taking her on a picnic. He’s certain about this – certain about his authority to make the decision, to carry out the plan. His eyes don’t leave hers, and he isn’t asking her permission; he’s already determined what’s going to happen.

Because he  _is_ , after all, the Doctor.

Rose says, “I don’t suppose we can have an intergalactic government running around, drafting sentient beings into service against their will and kidnapping people, holding them without due process, interrogating them. Condemning individuals to living death because of their genetic code.”

“Rose, you’re absolutely right. Best be safe, topple the whole organization,” he says, his expression brightening, as though she’s given him permission for something he’d been wanting to do anyway. 

Rose can’t tell if he’s joking. He’s wearing a small smile, but it’s lopsided, and there’s a hardness in his eyes.

“How about …” she draws out the last syllable, runs a hand through his hair, fingertips brushing his scalp “… we find a nice beach on a planet orbiting a warm sun, sit in the sand and draw up a list: reasons to reform the Shadow Proclamation, and reasons to obliterate it. Then we’ll decide together, hmm?”

“Top of the list in favor for obliteration: laying a finger on Rose Tyler.”

The Doctor kisses her — so suddenly, it takes her breath away. Mouth opening, arms tightening around her waist, beard tickling her skin. A sound comes from the back of his throat, need and relief and near-brokenness, all mixed together, and she’s kissing him back, her tongue meeting his. Pulling his hair a bit harder than she should, hitching her leg over his hip, ignoring her stiff joints and aching muscles, ignoring the fact that this cot is so narrow, if she tries to roll over on top of him, they’ll end up on the floor.

“Oh god, I missed you so much,” she mumbles into his neck as she kisses her way to his shoulder. 

The Doctor is so far gone — they both are — she’s already untucking his shirt, his hands are on her arse, urging the rocking movement of her hips. When he shifts against her, and pain shoots through her chest, she makes a strangled noise. 

He yanks away, draws up to look at her like a kid who’s been pulled away from a batch of cotton candy, still half-lost in a sugar-induced haze. “I was — it’s — the CPR. The chest compressions. There might be bruising. A bit of bruising.” His hand comes up, gently ghosts over her breastbone. “Sorry. If we were on the TARDIS, I’d have the equipment to —”

“Eighteen hours of rest,” she interrupts.

“Twelve,” he retorts. Rose manages to smile, taking small breaths as the pain fades. She tries to ignore the ache between her legs, the way she still wants to wrap her thighs around him right this very instant. The hard part of him pressing against the outside of her hip.

Moving gingerly, she pushes up to sit. “I’m starving.”

“Oh, there’s a device in the galley I’ve already fiddled with a bit, it should do nicely as a fryer! I could go see what kind of rooty-vegetables our friends at the Shadow Proclamation have tucked away in the pantry, make some alien chips.”

Saliva pools under her tongue, her eyes slowly widen in wonder. “What, really? Chips?”

The Doctor’s smile could power a city. “We’ve got to keep our prorities straight, even half a galaxy away from Earth.”

He hops up, extends an arm. Rose takes it, wobbles to her feet, leaning on him more than she thought she’d need to. Her toes wiggle on the warm metal floor. The spaceship hums around them — a soft thrum, almost perfectly familiar, even if it is pitched a bit lower than it was before, on another ship, in another galaxy. 

“And after chips, we’ll find that beach with the warm sun,” Rose says.

He leads her out the door, into the hallway, toward the galley. “And eventually we’ll pop by and have a word with the Shadow Architect.” He gestures to her orange robe, so long it’s dragging along behind them. “We ought to at least return his formal court frock, since I borrowed it without asking.”

She stops in her tracks, plucks the silky fabric between her thumb and forefinger and pulls it away from her hip. “What? No! You’re kidding!”

The Doctor winks at her. “Wait ‘til you see the pants I found in his clean laundry. Pink and charartreuse, I haven’t seen a tartan that horrifying since your mum wanted me to wear a kilt to the last Vitex fundraiser.”

Rose’s laughter rings down the corridor. 


	10. Chapter 10

The captain’s quarters aboard the Shadow Proclamation vessel are nothing like the Doctor’s quarters aboard the TARDIS — no wood paneling, floor to ceiling bookshelves, or sprawling four-poster bed piled high with soft mattresses and blankets. This room is fairly spare, but functional nonetheless. And it has a double-sized bed instead of a small bunk, which is all that really matters to Rose at the moment.

 

The Doctor’s curled around her, snoring softly in her ear. Stuffed with tubers they’d found in the pantry and made into some decent-tasting chips, they both fell into bed and dropped off to sleep hours ago.

When Rose wakes up, she realizes her joints aren’t feeling quite as stiff as they were before. Her muscles still ache a bit, and her chest is certainly sore, but she’s pleased with the idea that she’s going to be back to normal sooner rather than later.

Shifting beneath the covers, still in the Doctor’s arms, she turns to face him. He stirs, mutters something in his sleep. 

The last few months have been rough on him — she can see it, in the circles under his eyes and the hollow in his cheeks. He hasn’t been sleeping or eating, at least not well. 

Impulsively, she leans forward, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth. Her words are as soft as her breath: “I love you.”

“Rose Tyler, I love you.” 

His answer is so cogent, so sudden, she laughs in surprise. 

“You’re supposed to be asleep,” she says.

He cracks one eye open. “I  _was_ , until you started doing a little dance on your side of the bed.”

“Sorry.” She kisses his cheek, the tip of his nose, and the other cheek. Her hand slips down his ribcage, to the place where his shirt has come untucked from his trousers. Fingers skate across the bare skin of his waist. “I was just wondering, has it been twelve hours yet? ‘Cause I’m feeling better.  _Much_  better.”

“It’s been eleven hours and fifty-two minutes,” the Doctor replies, the last word ending in a squeak as her fingers slip around his hip, find the tiny dip in his back where he’s always ticklish. He stifles a yelp, his hips rolling forward as he tries to escape her touch. 

“Eight minutes of rest left?” Rose says, raising her eyebrows at him in the dim light. 

“No strenuous activity for at least another eight minutes. Doctor’s orders.” He grins, predatory and filthy, and he rolls her onto her back. “You’re just going to have to lie back and be still.”

Rose grins, too. “That shouldn’t be a problem.” The way she says the words, they’re clearly a challenge.

He leans down, lips capturing hers. Her mouth opens, tongue finds his, and she makes a noise — of need, of relief, of happiness. Her back arches, her arm instinctively coming up to wrap around his shoulders and draw him down on top of her. 

The Doctor pulls his mouth away from hers just long enough to make a  _tsk_ noise. He resumes kissing her, one hand pinning her arm down to the bed before he trails his fingers to her shoulder, across her chest, and gently urges her flat onto the bed again.

“Seven minutes,” he says into her mouth. “You need your rest. Close your eyes.”

He sucks her bottom lip into his mouth, grazes it with his teeth, and her eyes roll up in her head as her eyelids fall closed. 

“I missed you so much, Rose,” he says, his breath warm on her cheek. He kisses her jaw, the spot beneath her ear, trails his tongue down the line of her shoulder to the hollow of her throat. 

“I missed your skin, how soft it is, the way it smells.” He’s tracing her collarbone with his mouth, pulling her robe out of the way. His hair, wild and unruly as it is, tickles her chin, and she’s having a hard time breathing, practically using every ounce of her self control not to arch into his touch again.

“I missed your breath,” he says, planting the softest, most gentle of kisses on her breastbone, the place that still aches when she fills her lungs because he’d done CPR on her not so long ago. “The way it quivers when I touch you.” 

His hands have been working at the orange robe, fumbling with the strange alien fasteners holding it together, and the top one finally gives with a pop.  

Rose’s eyes are still closed, but she feels the bed shift as the Doctor stretches out alongside her. His long fingers slip under the robe, flicking the fabric off her body. The cool air hits her torso and she’s covered in goosebumps. She can’t help it — she bends the arm closest to his head, buries her hand in his hair. 

“I missed the way you put the lid back on my toothpaste when I forget.” His words are getting softer, more strained. “I missed the way you eat my pancakes and tell me they’re delicious, even when I burn them in the pan.”

His touch ghosts over her chest, across her breasts. She lets out a stuttering breath, and he sighs. His mouth follows his hand, kissing and suckling, and she can’t stay still any longer, she’s doing it again — arching up into his touch, reaching around his shoulders, fumbling with the button on his trousers. 

“Four minutes,” he says, then rolls her nipple between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. 

“Sod it, I feel fantastic,” she retorts, not bothering to unbutton his shirt, yanking it straight up over his head instead. She ends up smashing his nose, and his arm gets caught in the sleeve, and he flails wildly for a second, trying to wiggle the rest of the way out. 

She’s giggling, and he laughs right along with her, settling himself on top of her, his thigh resting between her legs. She takes his head in her hands, examines his face. 

“I missed the way you forget to put the lid on your toothpaste,” she says, pulling him down so she can kiss him. “I missed your burnt pancakes. And your socks on the floor. And your brilliant backrubs.”

The Doctor’s eyebrows wiggle, and it’s so ridiculous and gorgeous she laughs again. “My backrubs  _are_  spectacular. Even the High Regent of Spacula said so, and let me tell you, his standards were  _ridiculously_  high. And his back was the size of a small football pitch.”

“I missed this,” she says, resting her hand against his chest, atop his single beating heart. 

“Don’t ever leave me alone again,” he begs, and there’s a hollowness at the edge of his voice, a glimpse of the desperation he felt when she was gone. “I don’t want to do that — can’t do that. Oh god, I need you.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Doctor,” Rose replies, and she’s shoving his trousers off his hips, pushing them down with her heels as she wraps her legs around him. “I need you, too.”

He’s gentle without being tentative; careful of her bruised sternum and her aching muscles. The way they touch each other is like a homecoming, raw and honest with their need, comfortable in the way lovers who have known each other for a long time always are. She rolls him over, straddles him and they move together until they’re both shuddering with ecstasy, crying out each others’ names and falling apart in each others’ arms.

Afterward, they lie in a tangle of arms and legs and satisfaction, sharing breath and small kisses. It dawns on Rose, as she strokes his back, that the Doctor’s skin is broken. Bruised. 

“Oh my god,” she says, sitting up and leaning over him, lightly brushing her palm over one of the cuts. “Is this what they did to you?”

He gently draws her away, settles her back down into his arms. “The Shadow Proclamation’s efforts to extract some kind of confession. The physical torture, they didn’t try that route for long. Not once they realized it wouldn’t  work,” the Doctor replies. “It wasn’t bad. Not like you’re thinking.”

 _The physical torture._ Which means they escalated to mental — perhaps even psychic — torture in short order. Using the information they extracted from her memories, to torment him in all the ways he was most vulnerable. 

What did they show him, exactly? Visions of Rose’s death? Of children he might never have, being taken away or killed? His half-human body being broken, failing, not regenerating, over and over again?

Something worse?

“Oh, Rose.” The Doctor reaches up, wipes a tear that’s tracking down her nose. “It’s all over and done with. We’ve got beach planets and warm suns to find.”

“Do you suppose this universe has a Woman Wept?” Rose asks, trying for glib, her words shaking more than she means them to.

“Trans-warp drive will get us to that part of the galaxy within a day or so,” the Doctor replies. “We’ll go find out.”

Rose curls into his arms, buries her face in his shoulder. “I knew you’d come for me.”

She can hear the smile in his voice as he replies, “I knew you’d rescue yourself no matter what I did. I was just trying to get there before you’d had yourself declared the new Shadow Architect or something else equally as spectacular. I didn’t want to miss out on the fun.”

A laugh bubbles out of her, and she holds him tighter. “It’s not nearly as fun when you aren’t there. So that worked out well for both of us, then.”

The Doctor extracts himself from her arms, holds out a hand to help her up from the bed. “So, Woman Wept, is it? The control room’s not far.” He reaches for his trousers, in a pile on the floor.

Rose strolls past him, strutting so her hips roll. “Benefits of only having a crew of two: naked piloting.” She throws him a grin. “Last one there is co-pilot!”

She takes off running, and the Doctor is right after her, shouting, “You don’t even know how to get to the flight deck!” before he veers down a different corridor. 


End file.
